1995-11-04 04:00:00 PDT Los Angeles -- An exterminator has just left Loni Anderson's country French-style house in the mountains above Beverly Hills, and she is airing out the place. She walks around downstairs, sniffing to see whether the fumigating odor is gone.

Anderson is practicing her own kind of pest control these days, emotionally ridding herself of somebody who has been bugging her: her ex, Burt Reynolds.

Two years ago, Reynolds served her with divorce papers, threw her out of their Florida home and proceeded to humiliate her publicly by calling her a bad mother to their adopted son, Quinton, and implying that she had slept around.

WHY SHE KEPT MUM

Through it all, Anderson kept mum and instructed her family and friends to do the same. "I said to everybody, 'Don't get sucked into this or it will become a circus. Burt wants to make a war -- let him be in it all by himself. Someday I will talk.' "

Her turn to talk has come, and Anderson, 49, is sitting on her sofa talking her heart out, including about what until recently had been a deep, dark secret: the dozen or so times she says Reynolds physically abused her.

She is wearing tight faded blue jeans that show off her hourglass figure, a white sweater and apricot lipstick. These must be her colors: Her house is decorated in white -- white marble floors, a white piano -- with a touch of apricot.

On this day, as in her just-released autobiography, "My Life in High Heels" (William Morrow; $23), Anderson tells only part of what happened to destroy her 12-year relationship with Reynolds, the last five as husband and wife. The other half -- his motivation -- she says she still doesn't understand.

"You know, I have 1,001 questions that will never be answer ed."

During their very public breakup, it was a "challenge" to keep on going, Anderson admits. "But I had to get up every day. Wouldn't that be the worst irony of all, if not only did Burt dump me but he also made me check out of my life? I mean I couldn't give the man that satisfaction." With the help of ongoing therapy and support from her grown daughter, Deidra Hasselberg, and a new boyfriend, lawyer Geoff Brown, Anderson has come through it all. "I have a brand-new house and a brand- new life and a brand-new everything."

The $2.3 million, 6,500-square- foot house is the total of her settlement with Reynolds, she says. Some months he doesn't come up with the mortgage or the $15,000-a-month child support, and her lawyers have to get in touch with his lawyers.

"It's a very difficult situation. Sometimes he'll go for months (without paying) and sometimes it is all regular. I think it depends on if he is working," Anderson says.

She hasn't talked to Reynolds since their split. The one time she tried "because I thought it would be good to have a dialogue as parents," he gave the phone to Pam Seals, the former cocktail waitress he was seeing when he was married. "I think that was a very insulting thing for him to do, so obviously we can't talk," Anderson says.

NANNY GOES ALONG

When Quinton, 7, visits his father in Florida, Anderson insists that a nanny be present. The tabloids had a field day with that, inferring that she was afraid of sexual abuse, but Anderson says that was never a concern.

"I'm concerned about Burt's erratic behavior. . . . Quinton is small and I want him to be protected." His regular nanny has refused to go because, Anderson says, "Burt threw a chair at her," so a substitute nanny makes the trips.

Anderson blames drugs for some of Reynolds' odd behavior. In her book, she writes that he has taken Percodan for pain, Valium for anxiety and Compazine for their side effects.

"The physical abuse I always blamed on the drugs," Anderson says, detailing beatings that left her bruised all over her body, except her face. She covered the bruises or made excuses for them, such as telling a makeup artist that she had fallen down the stairs and "thank God Burt had caught me."

The worst incident happened a month before their breakup. "Burt shoved me all around the room, then threw me to the floor and opened the drawer and got out a loaded gun. He handed me the gun and told me to shoot myself and do us all a favor. I was terrified.

"Burt always said no one would ever believe me because he was Mr. Wonderful and the world loved him."

Watching the O.J. Simpson trial, Anderson says she could "empathize with everything I heard about Nicole Brown Simpson." When people would question why Brown would stay in the relationship, Anderson wanted to say: "You really have no idea the seductiveness and the charm and with what feeling this insidious thing happens to you." (Through his publicist, Joe Sutton, Reynolds said he had "no comment" about the charges of physical abuse, but that "he wishes Loni nothing but the very best from this day on.")

With three divorces behind her, Anderson has no plans to marry again -- "it hasn't been where I shine" -- though she and Geoff Brown live together. She is amazed that Brown "actually cooks and cleans up the kitchen" and that he will say to her, "You've had such a stressful day -- I'll put Quinton to bed and you just put your feet up."

Last year, Anderson thought she was pregnant. With one grandchild and another on the way, a part of her was relieved when it turned out to be false alarm, "but I was also a little disappointed. I like being a mom." A regular on "WKRP in Cincinnati" and "Nurses," she would like to do another TV series. "I love to work and I need to work," says Anderson, who was in a production of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" in Akron, Ohio, over the summer.

In December, she will star in a TV movie with an eerily appropriate title: "Deadly Family Secrets."